Tuesday, September 30, 2014

"...if my personal experience matches the findings of established science, I am more likely to be a believer. But if the science and my observations disagree, or science and common sense disagree, it triggers my B.S. detector." - Scott Adams

I was originally taught in college, by supposed "esteemed" professors, that men give love to get sex, and women use sex to get love. And women were monogamous because they needed a man to stay around to help raise their kids. And men were polygamous to "spread their seed."

Looking back to my high school and college days, I found I didn't believe this. For one thing, I met some very promiscuous women (and who they were attracted to had nothing with do with being an "Alpha") and I also found they were capable of multiple orgasms - as in having sex with five guys in a row. Why? It would have nothing to do with monogamy, that's for sure. It surely isn't to get the "genetically superior Alpha sperm" to improve your children.

What I realized quite early is that men are the real romantics, and women can be multiorgasmic sluts. I suppose "Evo-Psych" will come up with some rationalization to "explain" this. Good luck with that.

It's amusing the way "science" can flip-flop when the facts prove wrong long-held theories. It proves they were completely wrong in the first place and yet teaching it with utter assurance.

Some time ago I read the book What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire by journalist Daniel Bergner. (I've written about this book before.)

Bergner pointed out that women's sexuality is not some sort of civilizing force, but instead a ravenous, animalistic, civilization-destroying force. Religion has understood this for thousands of years - read the stories of Lilith and Jezebel. Or Joseph and Potiphar's wife.

As for those who dismiss the Bible as being written thousands of years ago by cave-dwelling camel-jockeys...well, they're just plain stupid.

It's clear this is why there are such restrictions on female sexuality. For God's sake, I once had a Romanian hooker sit down next to me and stick her tongue in my ear! And that's the least of what has happened to me.

Now start with the facts - men romantics, women ravenous multi-orgasmic sluts, and then try to Evo-Psych that. You can't do it. You have to take in account that one of the purposes of civilization is to repress the worst of human nature. So there is no "human nature" separate from society.

As for those restrictions on females...here's what one researcher told Bergner: "Those barriers are a testament to the power of the drive itself. It’s a pretty incredible testament. Because the drive must be so strong to override all of that."
He also said, "Women’s desire — its inherent range and innate power — is an underestimated and constrained force, even in our times, when all can seem so sexually inundated, so far beyond restriction. Despite the notions our culture continues to imbue, this force is not, for the most part, sparked or sustained by emotional intimacy and safety...one of our most comforting assumptions, soothing perhaps above all to men but clung to by both sexes, that female eros is much better made for monogamy than the male libido, is scarcely more than a fairy tale."

Bergner also said this: "Well, I guess the first thing to say is how struck I was by the distance between reality and the fable that we’ve been taught most recently by evolutionary psychology, that is, that men are driven to spread their seed and women, by comparison, are more driven to find one good provider, and that, therefore, while men are very poorly suited to monogamy, women are much better suited to monogamy. But that just really doesn’t stand up when you look at the science. The science behind that is flimsy, circular. And the science, when you look at it clearly, that stands in opposition to that is actually fairly strong — still emergent, but fairly strong. And so, that was the first thing that was so striking to me."

This, among many other reasons, is why I am such a critic of the Manosphere. A lot of the concepts in it are fairy tales (I recently read an article that claimed the Alpha brain-waves produced by meditation meant the meditator was an "Alpha" in real life. That's just pathetic.)

Those adolescent concepts of Alpha/Beta, shit tests, "chicks dig the Dark Triad," etc...the only reason they believe them is because they read them somewhere. Are they scientific? Not even close. Cherry-picking and Fallacies of Composition are not science.

Someday all this nonsense will sort itself out. The sooner the better.

Oh, by the way, this almost sounds like this: the more promiscuous a woman is, the harder it will be for her to fall in love. I've seen that...just the way I've seen a 13-year-old do five guys in a row.

Several years a friend used the word "Dalit." He was an American (as I am) and I asked what the word meant. "Niggers and white trash," he told me. Same thing, just different races.

When I looked up the word, I found it was based on the castes in India: Warriors, Priests (teachers, advisors, intellectuals), Merchants, Laborers...and then the dregs of society.

I'm part of the teacher/advisor/priest caste. My father was part of the Merchant class (general contractor) and his workers were part of the Laborer class. He tried to teach me his business but it didn't stick.

I knew about these classes long before I heard that word, Dalit. I was raised with a lot of Dalits, many of whom went to prison or are dead.

Because I knew so many of them, by the time I was in seventh grade I wondered why all of those different classes were jumbled together in public school. The schools were trying to improve the Dalits but only succeeded in dragging everyone else down.

The writer Jerry Pournelle writes often of the Warrior class (he calls them "the Legions") and he points out they're pretty pissed off these days. And when they get pissed off they take over. So I wonder what is coming.

Unfortunately, the Intellectual class consists these days of a bunch of nitwit leftist pseudo-intellectuals (aka "the Cathedral"). They're worse than worthless; they're dangerous.

The Dalits are as always just a drag on society, and the Merchants make mistakes with investments and opening businesses because most don't understand exactly how the government screws up the economy. And the ones that do just hoard their cash rather than risk it in a very uncertain economy.

So...the Dalits are dangerous parasites (and a growing class due to importing them), the Laborers can't find decent jobs, many Intellectuals are a danger due to their leftist ideas, and the Warriors are pissed off.

Okay, so marriage is at a 93-year low. Plus, if Pareto's 80/20 law is true, then 80% of men are considered below-average by women in attractiveness.

Incidentally, one of my friends told me his very good-looking son is popular with women, and his roommates, who are mostly dope-smoking, game-playing slackers, are a bit envious of him. They've given up on women because they can't get any.

Perhaps it's true: 20% of the men get 80% of the women. I do know I was the object of envious attacks when I was 21.

Curious that women always blame their problems on men, and very few will look in the mirror.

I've mentioned before I used to own a taxi and ran hookers around. Some of the guys paid for them to watch movies or go to a restaurant. Didn't even have sex with them. And, boy, was that a revelation.

I did understand the guys who were just physically fucked-up - crippled, deformed, things like that.

So what are these utterly unpopular guys going to do? Pornography, of course. The internet is full of it, and for free. Whores, too. And the economy is so bad they're getting cheaper and cheaper (when driving my taxi I was offered BJs for cheeseburgers and rides).

I do wonder about sexbots, though. They're pretty damn expensive. There are the cheaper versions, like fleshlights.

About five years ago one of the sister's computer-nerd friends died, and in his house I immediately checked the top shelf in the bedroom closet. Pornography and a fleshlight. I put them in the dumpster before his parents found them.

Did "feminists" expect this in their attempts to remake men into women? Of course not. Leftists have no understanding whatsoever of human nature.

The next step is the attempt to ban whores, ban pornography, and ban sexbots? So what are the utterly unpopular guys going to do, then? Just die? Become invisible? Be exiled? Or go MGTOW and collapse the economy?

Of course, the naive will claim they just need "Game," that panacea for all problems. That's why they're naive.

Want to know something interesting? I am the same age as Homer Simpson and Walter White. That means something went bad right around 1974, when all of us graduated high school.

A lot of those I knew in high school were either pot-smoking, party-down hedonists - me - or criminals (could have been me). Homer Simpsons or Walter Whites.

For one thing, Richard Nixon went off the gold standard in 1971, and because of that and several other things, wages stopped going up in January of 1974. They have never recovered, contrary to the claims (I mean lies) of the government.

As for Vietnam, it ended in August of 1973. I was last year to get a draft card.

Since, as Ezra Pound so perceptively noted, artists are the antennae of the race, what do these two characters tell us?

One, there are the stupid, ignorant, beer-guzzling Americans who are basically interested in in bread and circuses. They don't count except as mostly a drag on everything.

Homer is basically a fat drunken hedonist, so I would put modern, fat, high, game-playing neckbeards in his category.

Then we have the smarter Walter White criminal types. They are most interesting.

Since the economy has been bad for so long, and is going is stay bad, I expect some of the smarter people to go black market. Think the Darknet. First there was Silk Road, which is now gone. It has been replaced by 20 of them, stronger and more secure.

Of course, these people can spend their lives working some shit job. That ain't gonna work for a lot of guys. I'd put hackers in this category.

Ever since Vietnam, which went on for ten years and was ended by media coverage, people my age (and younger) have never trusted the government. I operate on the assumption everything it says is a lie. I'm right, too.

After Vietnam a bunch of veterans went nuts. They're still living in shacks up in the rural Pacific Northwest. Think First Blood, the novel on which Rambo was based. In the novel it was a fight between a cop and Rambo - and both died. The government against its own soldiers. And when was the novel published? 1972.

We're producing even more of these guys, coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

A lot of men have been lied to. They haven't gotten what they were promised. They're considered disposable.

Conclusion? Some people are going to go Homer Simpson Stupid Slob. Others are, in varying ways, going to go Walter White. Mostly, I think, through some sort of computer "crime."

Then we have all those vets coming out of the current wars - and God knows what they're going to do. I do know the government is going to go after them as a "threat."

Hedonistic neckbeards, and "criminal" hackers and "criminal" pissed-off vets. Homer Simpsons and Walter Whites - and the government, as usual, is clueless about the coming storms. It's going to be an interesting ride. Let's see who "wins" - if anyone.

Monday, September 29, 2014

"The belief that the State can protect females from males when women have lost all of their value to them as kin and family members is a Marxist fantasy." - Vault-co

This is from the site Zerohedge and was written by by James H. Kunstler.

What he writes about I've noticed myself. One of my friends and I discuss this often, because he has a 21-year-old son. Young men rarely approach women anymore, preferring to get high and play video games. That's MGTOW, even if they have never heard the concept.

Others like to pretend the are PUAs. MGTOW is flight: PUAs are fight. Is there anything else, when you're marginalized and scapegoated? Perhaps.

There is always the solace of religion, which can get pretty militant. That's flight to start a fight. As I've said before, humiliation leads to revenge, which is an attempt to replace shame with pride. Often it's done with violence.

The real losers are these so-called "Beta" males. But they don't really exist, because as John Norman noticed in one of his Gor novels, "All men are dangerous." Just push enough and find out.

"I played fiddle at a small-town, country dance last night with several other musicians and it was a merry enough time because that kind of self-made music has the power to fortify spirits. About half the dancers were over 40 and the rest were teenage girls. The absence of young men was conspicuous. Toward the end of the evening, it was just girls dancing with girls. A wonderful and fundamental tension was not present in the room.

"The young men are out there somewhere in the country towns, but this society increasingly has no use or no place for them, except in the army. There is absolutely no public conversation about the near total devaluation of young men in the economic and social life of the USA, though there is near-hysterical triumphalism about the success of young women in every realm from sports to politics to business, and to go with that an equal amount of valorization for people who develop an ambiguous sexual identity.

"There really is no local forum for public discussion in the flyover regions of the USA. The few remaining local newspapers are parodies of what newspapers once were, and the schools maintain a fog of sanctimony that penalizes thinking outside the bright-side box. Television and its step-child, the internet, offer only the worst temptations of hyper-sexual stimulation, artificial violence, and grandiose wealth-and-power fantasies. There aren’t even any taverns where people can gather for casual talk.

"Many of the remaining jobs 'out there' are jobs that can be done by anyone — certainly the office work, but also the jobs with near-zero meaning, minimal income, and no status in the national chain burger shacks and box stores — and young women are more reliably subject to control than young men jacked on testosterone, corn syrup, and Grand Theft Auto.

"Of course, the idea that higher education can lift a population out of this vortex of anomie is a cruel joke, especially now with the college loan racket parasitizing that flickering wish to succeed, turning young people into debt donkeys. The shelf-life of that particular set of lies and swindles will hit its sell-by date soon in a massive debt repudiation — and the nation will come to marvel at the mendacious system it allowed itself to get sucked into. But this still only begs the question of what young men will do in such a deceitful system.

"My guess is that they will shift their attention and activity from the mind-slavery of the current Potemkin economy to the very monster we find ourselves fighting overseas: a domestic ISIS-style explosion of wrath wrapped in an extreme ideology of one kind or another replete with savagery and vengeance-seeking. The most dangerous thing that any society can do is invalidate young men. When the explosion of youthful male wrath occurs in the USA, it will come along at exactly the same time as all the other benchmarks of order become unmoored - especially the ones in money and politics - which will shatter the faith of the non-young and the non-male, too. Also, just imagine for a moment the numbers of young men America has trained with military skills the past 20 years. Not all of them will be disabled with PTSD, or mollified with rinky-dink jobs at the Wal-Mart, or lost in the transports of heroin and methedrine.

"The authorities will have no way to understand what is happening and we are certain to endure a long season of violence and social chaos as a result. The re-set from that will be an economy and a society that few now yammering will recognize. That society emerging from the ashes of the current matrix of rackets will desperately need young men to rebuild, and there will be plenty of opportunity for them - though it won’t feature fast cars, Kanye West downloads, or bottle service.

"There are other ways for young men to find a useful and valued place in a society, but these are too far beyond the ken of our current meager
narratives."

I didn't hate school. I was bored by it and so daydreamed. There were several notes on my report cards (which I still have) about this, about how I was not "fulfilling my potential." I still don't know what the teachers meant by that.

The only time I was semi-satisfied and content was when on weekends I wandered the area I was raised in - the lake and the woods. The things I saw - not only about a million tadpoles, but huge ones I realized later turned into mudpuppies. Bamboo. Wild onions. Snapping turtles (which have some sort of samurai armor). Cottonmouths and moccasins (same snake, really). Catching crawdads on a string with bread dough at the end.

What I did, I did in every season. What I noticed, even at 11 and 12, is that everything went in cycles. Winter, spring, summer, fall, winter. Growth, maturity, decline, death...repeat. I first noticed it with plants, which were tropical-lush in the area I was raised.

I figured there were people just like me in the past. Take astrology. The only way anyone could figure this out was to sleep during the day and stay up all night studying the stars, the way I stayed up all night down at the lake, lying there with friends, waiting for meteor showers.

Why did some of the lights in the sky waver? Wait - those are stars, which the atmosphere made twinkle. The big bright ones that didn't waver? Turned out those are planets.

Now imagine doing that for years, thousands of years in the past. These days, how many people know the difference between a new moon and a full moon, or which fingernail shape of the moon indicates a coming full moon or new moon? I know the difference.

I've also known for years the word "meek" that Jesus used in the New Testament really translates as "humbly observant."

That painting? "Astronomer by Candlelight," by Gerrit Dou. Notice the absorbed expression on his face. I don't see that expression that much anymore. I often have it, which is one of the reasons so many people think I'm strange.

That astronomer is an introvert. The expression says it all.

I've for years thought there was a war between smart introverts and the most stupid of extroverts. Some, such as Tex Arcane, don't even consider stupid extroverts to be human. To him it's Homo Sapiens (extroverts) vs. Neanderthals (introverts). When I was growing up I thought certain people were trying to kill me.

Whether or not they are literally right is not the point. The point is that when you are an introvert, the worst of extroverts don't even appear to be quite human to you. They're closer to monsters. Insane ones.

Public schools don't help things. They make it worse. Sometimes, a lot worse. They've gotten so bad they should be closed down. There is no competition, and it's competition that makes things better.

I'd like to see schools strictly for introverts. I'd be interested in seeing what they could produce when they grow up.

Throughout the world there are philosophies, mythologies and religion in which everything is either masculine or feminine, from bottom (say atoms) to top (whatever the "top" is). Different words are used: positive/negative, yin/yang, creation/destruction, etc.

These concepts are never opposed to each other, but complementary. One cannot exist without the other. And, obviously, they have to be in balance.

Years ago I remember watching the movie Koyaanisqatsi, which means "Life Out of Balance." It's a rather interesting film, one worth seeing.

Of course, when things are out of balance, they end up spinning out of control.

All you have to do is pay a little bit of attention, and it's not hard at all to see that things are out of balance, especially, these days, the relationships between men and women.

The first time I realized something was wrong when I encountered the monster Shulamith Firestone (an early radical feminist) in college. I think I was 20.

Doesn't even look right, does she? She wasn't. She became schizophrenic and ended up being found dead in her apartment.

Wikipedia had this to say about her: "Firestone argued that gender inequality originated in the patriarchal societal structures imposed upon women through their biology; the physical, social and psychological disadvantages imposed by pregnancy, childbirth, and subsequent child-rearing. She advocated the use of cybernetics to carry out human reproduction in laboratories as well as the proliferation of contraception, abortion, and state support for child-rearing; enabling them to escape their biologically determined positions in society. Firestone described pregnancy as 'barbaric', and writes that a friend of hers compared labor to 'shitting a pumpkin'. Among the reproductive technologies she predicted were sex selection and in vitro fertilization.

"Firestone explored a number of possible social changes that she argued would result in a post-patriarchal society, including the abolition of the nuclear family and the promotion of living in community units within a socialist society."

I thought she was such a nut her ideas would go nowhere, but unfortunately they have, in one form or another. Look around you, and see where her leftist ideas have led.

Such women are leftists and ultimately hate men (Eric von Kuehnelt-Leddihn described leftism as the attempt to "overthrow the Father"), which is why leftism is atheistic and materialistic and thinks everyone should be "equal," much like ants. And that includes getting rid of the biological differences between men and women. Or getting rid of men completely, the way Valerie Solanis wanted to do (Solanis shot Andy Warhol and was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic).

Speaking of Kuehnelt-Leddihn, in his magnum opus, Leftism Revisited he points out leftists have always tried to transcend human nature though bizarre, hallucinatory fantasies, which they really thought could manifest itself in reality if we just thought about it hard enough.

When things are out of balance between the masculine and feminine, both parts become destructive, just in different ways. The masculine doesn't attempt to destroy the feminine, just crush it and control it. The feminine, unfortunately, attempts to destroy the masculine and turn it into the feminine. Which means, ultimately the feminine ends up destroying itself.

Which is self-delusion, since women are completely dependent on men. If men were to withdraw everything they have created from women, they'd be in a hell of a mess, wouldn't they?

Now if it's true that everything is masculine/feminine from the top to the bottom, it means we'll never make them the same, that is, equal. If somehow we did, we wouldn't be human anymore, and would probably go extinct.

Sunday, September 28, 2014

"Know the active, the masculine, yet keep to the feminine, the passive" - Tao Te Ching

"Who knows when this cycle will end?” - Tao Te Ching

It's fascinating to watch how things go in cycles. I see things as a cybernetic feedback system, where A affects B, then B affects A. It's why I've had my doubts about about linear cause-and-effect for years. That's just a small part of the whole story.

I've also been struck for years how masculine/feminine applies to everything, with the active being defined as masculine and the passive defined as the feminine. There is movement and rest in everything - and those thing go in a cycle. Sometimes a small cycle, sometimes a big cycle, sometimes a gigantic cycle (God spends six days creating everything and rests on the seventh - a story, which I have to admit, has always cracked me up).

There is the fact God as always been considered masculine but but Mary is feminine. Even in Protestantism there are female many female saints. For that matter, think of the first "split" into male and female - Adam and Eve. And when human male and female come together, there is creation - babies.

Men by nature are the active, the creative - the discovers, the inventors. It's why we have civilization. Women have been the the nurturing, the passive, the receptive. It's why we have a place to rest. Motion and rest. Put them together in balance and you have creation and growth, rest and relaxation.

The feminine is about nurturing and support, rest leading to regeneration - it's why women give birth, or why sleep (rest) is about regeneration leading to activity during the day.

Of course, things have for now gone haywire. For now, but not in the future. Cycles, remember? But as for now, things are out of balance.

The Manosphere is a reaction to feminism. That much is obvious. A (the feminine) affects B (the masculine) and B reacts and then begins to affect A.

Many of the ideas in the Manosphere have gone way too far - thinking Evo-Pysch is a real science, using it to justify the ideas of women being loveless hypergamous whores, dubious, dangerous and narcissistic ideas about "Alpha/Beta," "chicks dig the Dark Triad," women as "plates," etc. Those who spout such ideas are fools, no matter how well they write. Imagine where those ideas lead.

It's clear the younger believers in such things were raised with weak/nonexistent fathers and clueless mothers, whether single or not. Those raised in more stable families - with some exceptions - don't believe in these things and in fact see them as adolescent cluelessness.

The whole things bears a resemblance to a pendulum - swings too far one way, then another. Too much motion and not enough rest. No too active fighting and not enough response and reflection.

It'll never last, of course. It never does. Grow, collapse...then regeneration. Imagine the life of plants and apply them to humans. Everything in a cycle. That's what I learned as a 12-year-old introvert wandering the woods every season in the year.

“All human things are a circle.” -Inscription upon the temple at Athens

"Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls. It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world."- the Kinks, "Lola"

"Everywhere is freaks and hairies/Dykes and fairies, tell me where is sanity" - Ten Years After, "I'd Love to Change the World"

"Many historians had been trying for some time to set the record straight on the Crusades — misconceptions are all too common. These historians are not revisionists, but mainstream scholars offering the fruit of several decades of very careful, very serious scholarship. For them, current interest is a 'teaching moment,' an opportunity to explain the Crusades while people are actually listening. It won’t last long, so here goes. With the possible exception of Umberto Eco, medieval scholars are not used to getting much media attention. We tend to be a quiet lot (except during the annual bacchanalia we call the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of all places), poring over musty chronicles and writing dull yet meticulous studies that few will read. Imagine, then, my surprise when within days of the September 11 attacks, the Middle Ages suddenly became relevant.

'As a Crusade historian, I found the tranquil solitude of the ivory tower shattered by journalists, editors, and talk-show hosts on tight deadlines eager to get the real scoop. What were the Crusades?, they asked. When were they? Just how insensitive was President George W. Bush for using the word 'crusade' in his remarks? With a few of my callers I had the distinct impression that they already knew the answers to their questions, or at least thought they did. What they really wanted was an expert to say it all back to them. For example, I was frequently asked to comment on the fact that the Islamic world has a just grievance against the West. Doesn’t the present violence, they persisted, have its roots in the Crusades’ brutal and unprovoked attacks against a sophisticated and tolerant Muslim world? In other words, aren’t the Crusades really to blame?

"Osama bin Laden certainly thinks so. In his various video performances, he never fails to describe the American war against terrorism as a new Crusade against Islam. Ex-president Bill Clinton has also fingered the Crusades as the root cause of the present conflict. In a speech at Georgetown University, he recounted (and embellished) a massacre of Jews after the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 and informed his audience that the episode was still bitterly remembered in the Middle East. (Why Islamist terrorists should be upset about the killing of Jews was not explained.) Clinton took a beating on the nation’s editorial pages for wanting so much to blame the United States that he was willing to reach back to the Middle Ages. Yet no one disputed the ex-president’s fundamental premise.

"Well, almost no one. Many historians had been trying to set the record straight on the Crusades long before Clinton discovered them. They are not revisionists, like the American historians who manufactured the Enola Gay exhibit, but mainstream scholars offering the fruit of several decades of very careful, very serious scholarship. For them, this is a 'teaching moment,' an opportunity to explain the Crusades while people are actually listening. It won’t last long, so here goes.

"Misconceptions about the Crusades are all too common. The Crusades are generally portrayed as a series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and fought by religious fanatics. They are supposed to have been the epitome of self-righteousness and intolerance, a black stain on the history of the Catholic Church in particular and Western civilization in general. A breed of proto-imperialists, the Crusaders introduced Western aggression to the peaceful Middle East and then deformed the enlightened Muslim culture, leaving it in ruins. For variations on this theme, one need not look far. See, for example, Steven Runciman’s famous three-volume epic, History of the Crusades, or the BBC/A&E documentary, The Crusades, hosted by Terry Jones. Both are terrible history yet wonderfully entertaining.

"So what is the truth about the Crusades? Scholars are still working some of that out. But much can already be said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression — an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

"Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity — and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion — has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

"With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt — once the most heavily Christian areas in the world — quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.

"That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.

"Pope Urban II called upon the knights of Christendom to push back the conquests of Islam at the Council of Clermont in 1095. The response was tremendous. Many thousands of warriors took the vow of the cross and prepared for war. Why did they do it? The answer to that question has been badly misunderstood. In the wake of the Enlightenment, it was usually asserted that Crusaders were merely lacklands and ne’er-do-wells who took advantage of an opportunity to rob and pillage in a faraway land. The Crusaders’ expressed sentiments of piety, self-sacrifice, and love for God were obviously not to be taken seriously. They were only a front for darker designs.

"During the past two decades, computer-assisted charter studies have demolished that contrivance. Scholars have discovered that crusading knights were generally wealthy men with plenty of their own land in Europe. Nevertheless, they willingly gave up everything to undertake the holy mission. Crusading was not cheap. Even wealthy lords could easily impoverish themselves and their families by joining a Crusade. They did so not because they expected material wealth (which many of them had already) but because they hoped to store up treasure where rust and moth could not corrupt. They were keenly aware of their sinfulness and eager to undertake the hardships of the Crusade as a penitential act of charity and love. Europe is littered with thousands of medieval charters attesting to these sentiments, charters in which these men still speak to us today if we will listen. Of course, they were not opposed to capturing booty if it could be had. But the truth is that the Crusades were notoriously bad for plunder. A few people got rich, but the vast majority returned with nothing.

"Urban II gave the Crusaders two goals, both of which would remain central to the eastern Crusades for centuries. The first was to rescue the Christians of the East. As his successor, Pope Innocent III, later wrote:

How does a man love according to divine precept his neighbor as himself when, knowing that his Christian brothers in faith and in name are held by the perfidious Muslims in strict confinement and weighed down by the yoke of heaviest servitude, he does not devote himself to the task of freeing them? …Is it by chance that you do not know that many thousands of Christians are bound in slavery and imprisoned by the Muslims, tortured with innumerable torments?

“'Crusading,' Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith has rightly argued, was understood as an 'an act of love' — in this case, the love of one’s neighbor. The Crusade was seen as an errand of mercy to right a terrible wrong. As Pope Innocent III wrote to the Knights Templar, 'You carry out in deeds the words of the Gospel, ‘Greater love than this hath no man, that he lay down his life for his friends.’'

"The second goal was the liberation of Jerusalem and the other places made holy by the life of Christ. The word crusade is modern. Medieval Crusaders saw themselves as pilgrims, performing acts of righteousness on their way to the Holy Sepulcher. The Crusade indulgence they received was canonically related to the pilgrimage indulgence. This goal was frequently described in feudal terms. When calling the Fifth Crusade in 1215, Innocent III wrote:

Consider most dear sons, consider carefully that if any temporal king was thrown out of his domain and perhaps captured, would he not, when he was restored to his pristine liberty and the time had come for dispensing justice look on his vassals as unfaithful and traitors…unless they had committed not only their property but also their persons to the task of freeing him? …And similarly will not Jesus Christ, the king of kings and lord of lords, whose servant you cannot deny being, who joined your soul to your body, who redeemed you with the Precious Blood…condemn you for the vice of ingratitude and the crime of infidelity if you neglect to help Him?

"The reconquest of Jerusalem, therefore, was not colonialism but an act of restoration and an open declaration of one’s love of God. Medieval men knew, of course, that God had the power to restore Jerusalem Himself — indeed, He had the power to restore the whole world to His rule. Yet as St. Bernard of Clairvaux preached, His refusal to do so was a blessing to His people:

Again I say, consider the Almighty’s goodness and pay heed to His plans of mercy. He puts Himself under obligation to you, or rather feigns to do so, that He can help you to satisfy your obligations toward Himself…. I call blessed the generation that can seize an opportunity of such rich indulgence as this.

"It is often assumed that the central goal of the Crusades was forced conversion of the Muslim world. Nothing could be further from the truth. From the perspective of medieval Christians, Muslims were the enemies of Christ and His Church. It was the Crusaders’ task to defeat and defend against them. That was all. Muslims who lived in Crusader-won territories were generally allowed to retain their property and livelihood, and always their religion. Indeed, throughout the history of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, Muslim inhabitants far outnumbered the Catholics. It was not until the 13th century that the Franciscans began conversion efforts among Muslims. But these were mostly unsuccessful and finally abandoned. In any case, such efforts were by peaceful persuasion, not the threat of violence.

"The Crusades were wars, so it would be a mistake to characterize them as nothing but piety and good intentions. Like all warfare, the violence was brutal (although not as brutal as modern wars). There were mishaps, blunders, and crimes. These are usually well-remembered today. During the early days of the First Crusade in 1095, a ragtag band of Crusaders led by Count Emicho of Leiningen made its way down the Rhine, robbing and murdering all the Jews they could find. Without success, the local bishops attempted to stop the carnage. In the eyes of these warriors, the Jews, like the Muslims, were the enemies of Christ. Plundering and killing them, then, was no vice. Indeed, they believed it was a righteous deed, since the Jews’ money could be used to fund the Crusade to Jerusalem. But they were wrong, and the Church strongly condemned the anti-Jewish attacks.

"Fifty years later, when the Second Crusade was gearing up, St. Bernard frequently preached that the Jews were not to be persecuted:

Ask anyone who knows the Sacred Scriptures what he finds foretold of the Jews in the Psalm. 'Not for their destruction do I pray,' it says. The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered…. Under Christian princes they endure a hard captivity, but 'they only wait for the time of their deliverance.'

"Nevertheless, a fellow Cistercian monk named Radulf stirred up people against the Rhineland Jews, despite numerous letters from Bernard demanding that he stop. At last Bernard was forced to travel to Germany himself, where he caught up with Radulf, sent him back to his convent, and ended the massacres.

"It is often said that the roots of the Holocaust can be seen in these medieval pogroms. That may be. But if so, those roots are far deeper and more widespread than the Crusades. Jews perished during the Crusades, but the purpose of the Crusades was not to kill Jews. Quite the contrary: Popes, bishops, and preachers made it clear that the Jews of Europe were to be left unmolested. In a modern war, we call tragic deaths like these 'collateral damage.' Even with smart technologies, the United States has killed far more innocents in our wars than the Crusaders ever could. But no one would seriously argue that the purpose of American wars is to kill women and children.

"By any reckoning, the First Crusade was a long shot. There was no leader, no chain of command, no supply lines, no detailed strategy. It was simply thousands of warriors marching deep into enemy territory, committed to a common cause. Many of them died, either in battle or through disease or starvation. It was a rough campaign, one that seemed always on the brink of disaster. Yet it was miraculously successful. By 1098, the Crusaders had restored Nicaea and Antioch to Christian rule. In July 1099, they conquered Jerusalem and began to build a Christian state in Palestine. The joy in Europe was unbridled. It seemed that the tide of history, which had lifted the Muslims to such heights, was now turning.

"But it was not. When we think about the Middle Ages, it is easy to view Europe in light of what it became rather than what it was. The colossus of the medieval world was Islam, not Christendom. The Crusades are interesting largely because they were an attempt to counter that trend. But in five centuries of crusading, it was only the First Crusade that significantly rolled back the military progress of Islam. It was downhill from there.

"When the Crusader County of Edessa fell to the Turks and Kurds in 1144, there was an enormous groundswell of support for a new Crusade in Europe. It was led by two kings, Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, and preached by St. Bernard himself. It failed miserably. Most of the Crusaders were killed along the way. Those who made it to Jerusalem only made things worse by attacking Muslim Damascus, which formerly had been a strong ally of the Christians. In the wake of such a disaster, Christians across Europe were forced to accept not only the continued growth of Muslim power but the certainty that God was punishing the West for its sins. Lay piety movements sprouted up throughout Europe, all rooted in the desire to purify Christian society so that it might be worthy of victory in the East.

"Crusading in the late twelfth century, therefore, became a total war effort. Every person, no matter how weak or poor, was called to help. Warriors were asked to sacrifice their wealth and, if need be, their lives for the defense of the Christian East. On the home front, all Christians were called to support the Crusades through prayer, fasting, and alms. Yet still the Muslims grew in strength. Saladin, the great unifier, had forged the Muslim Near East into a single entity, all the while preaching jihad against the Christians. In 1187 at the Battle of Hattin, his forces wiped out the combined armies of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem and captured the precious relic of the True Cross. Defenseless, the Christian cities began surrendering one by one, culminating in the surrender of Jerusalem on October 2. Only a tiny handful of ports held out.

"The response was the Third Crusade. It was led by Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa of the German Empire, King Philip II Augustus of France, and King Richard I Lionheart of England. By any measure it was a grand affair, although not quite as grand as the Christians had hoped. The aged Frederick drowned while crossing a river on horseback, so his army returned home before reaching the Holy Land. Philip and Richard came by boat, but their incessant bickering only added to an already divisive situation on the ground in Palestine. After recapturing Acre, the king of France went home, where he busied himself carving up Richard’s French holdings. The Crusade, therefore, fell into Richard’s lap. A skilled warrior, gifted leader, and superb tactician, Richard led the Christian forces to victory after victory, eventually reconquering the entire coast. But Jerusalem was not on the coast, and after two abortive attempts to secure supply lines to the Holy City, Richard at last gave up. Promising to return one day, he struck a truce with Saladin that ensured peace in the region and free access to Jerusalem for unarmed pilgrims. But it was a bitter pill to swallow. The desire to restore Jerusalem to Christian rule and regain the True Cross remained intense throughout Europe.

"The Crusades of the 13th century were larger, better funded, and better organized. But they too failed. The Fourth Crusade (1201-1204) ran aground when it was seduced into a web of Byzantine politics, which the Westerners never fully understood. They had made a detour to Constantinople to support an imperial claimant who promised great rewards and support for the Holy Land. Yet once he was on the throne of the Caesars, their benefactor found that he could not pay what he had promised. Thus betrayed by their Greek friends, in 1204 the Crusaders attacked, captured, and brutally sacked Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the world. Pope Innocent III, who had previously excommunicated the entire Crusade, strongly denounced the Crusaders. But there was little else he could do. The tragic events of 1204 closed an iron door between Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox, a door that even today Pope John Paul II has been unable to reopen. It is a terrible irony that the Crusades, which were a direct result of the Catholic desire to rescue the Orthodox people, drove the two further — and perhaps irrevocably — apart.

"The remainder of the 13th century’s Crusades did little better. The Fifth Crusade (1217-1221) managed briefly to capture Damietta in Egypt, but the Muslims eventually defeated the army and reoccupied the city. St. Louis IX of France led two Crusades in his life. The first also captured Damietta, but Louis was quickly outwitted by the Egyptians and forced to abandon the city. Although Louis was in the Holy Land for several years, spending freely on defensive works, he never achieved his fondest wish: to free Jerusalem. He was a much older man in 1270 when he led another Crusade to Tunis, where he died of a disease that ravaged the camp. After St. Louis’s death, the ruthless Muslim leaders, Baybars and Kalavun, waged a brutal jihad against the Christians in Palestine. By 1291, the Muslim forces had succeeded in killing or ejecting the last of the Crusaders, thus erasing the Crusader kingdom from the map. Despite numerous attempts and many more plans, Christian forces were never again able to gain a foothold in the region until the 19th century.

"One might think that three centuries of Christian defeats would have soured Europeans on the idea of Crusade. Not at all. In one sense, they had little alternative. Muslim kingdoms were becoming more, not less, powerful in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. The Ottoman Turks conquered not only their fellow Muslims, thus further unifying Islam, but also continued to press westward, capturing Constantinople and plunging deep into Europe itself. By the 15th century, the Crusades were no longer errands of mercy for a distant people but desperate attempts of one of the last remnants of Christendom to survive. Europeans began to ponder the real possibility that Islam would finally achieve its aim of conquering the entire Christian world. One of the great best-sellers of the time, Sebastian Brant’s The Ship of Fools, gave voice to this sentiment in a chapter titled 'Of the Decline of the Faith':

Our faith was strong in th’ Orient,
It ruled in all of Asia,
In Moorish lands and Africa.
But now for us these lands are gone
‘Twould even grieve the hardest stone….
Four sisters of our Church you find,
They’re of the patriarchic kind:
Constantinople, Alexandria,
Jerusalem, Antiochia.
But they’ve been forfeited and sacked
And soon the head will be attacked.

Of course, that is not what happened. But it very nearly did. In 1480, Sultan Mehmed II captured Otranto as a beachhead for his invasion of Italy. Rome was evacuated. Yet the sultan died shortly thereafter, and his plan died with him. In 1529, Suleiman the Magnificent laid siege to Vienna. If not for a run of freak rainstorms that delayed his progress and forced him to leave behind much of his artillery, it is virtually certain that the Turks would have taken the city. Germany, then, would have been at their mercy.

"Yet, even while these close shaves were taking place, something else was brewing in Europe — something unprecedented in human history. The Renaissance, born from a strange mixture of Roman values, medieval piety, and a unique respect for commerce and entrepreneurialism, had led to other movements like humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Age of Exploration. Even while fighting for its life, Europe was preparing to expand on a global scale. The Protestant Reformation, which rejected the papacy and the doctrine of indulgence, made Crusades unthinkable for many Europeans, thus leaving the fighting to the Catholics. In 1571, a Holy League, which was itself a Crusade, defeated the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto. Yet military victories like that remained rare. The Muslim threat was neutralized economically. As Europe grew in wealth and power, the once awesome and sophisticated Turks began to seem backward and pathetic — no longer worth a Crusade. The 'Sick Man of Europe' limped along until the 20th century, when he finally expired, leaving behind the present mess of the modern Middle East.

"From the safe distance of many centuries, it is easy enough to scowl in disgust at the Crusades. Religion, after all, is nothing to fight wars over. But we should be mindful that our medieval ancestors would have been equally disgusted by our infinitely more destructive wars fought in the name of political ideologies. And yet, both the medieval and the modern soldier fight ultimately for their own world and all that makes it up. Both are willing to suffer enormous sacrifice, provided that it is in the service of something they hold dear, something greater than themselves. Whether we admire the Crusaders or not, it is a fact that the world we know today would not exist without their efforts. The ancient faith of Christianity, with its respect for women and antipathy toward slavery, not only survived but flourished. Without the Crusades, it might well have followed Zoroastrianism, another of Islam’s rivals, into extinction."

Saturday, September 27, 2014

“There is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.” –Homer

I've written of the Memoirs of Casanova before. He was a hedonist and a sensualist, dabbled in the occult, and pretty much wrecked his life by middle-age (I've seen hedonists do this in life).

One thing not mentioned in this Wikipedia article is that the love of his life rejected him for another man, and after that he devoted his life to seducing women.

His memoirs, which I read many years ago, is one of the reasons I am so amused by the Manosphere and the belief of the many youngsters within that they think they so much about life, when being utterly ignorant of history.

Casanova was close to being of the "Dark Triad" - little or no conscience. And he was a con man. And he used fake religion, like David Koresh and Jim Jones. He also was a glib, smooth talker.

"Giacomo Girolamo Casanova (Italian pronunciation: [ˈdʒaːkomo kazaˈnɔːva]; 2 April 1725 – 4 June 1798) was an Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice. His autobiography, Histoire de ma vie (Story of My Life), is regarded as one of the most authentic sources of the customs and norms of European social life during the 18th century.

"As was not uncommon at the time, Casanova, depending on circumstances, used more or less fictitious names such as baron or count of Farussi (the name of his mother) or Chevalier de Seingalt (pronounced Saint-Galle, as in French). He often signed his works Jacques Casanova de Seingalt after he began writing in French following his second exile from Venice.

"He has become so famous for his often complicated and elaborate affairs with women that his name is now synonymous with 'womanizer'. He associated with European royalty, popes and cardinals, along with luminaries such as Voltaire, Goethe and Mozart. He spent his last years in Bohemia as a librarian in Count Waldstein's household, where he also wrote the story of his life.

"Giacomo Girolamo Casanova was born in Venice in 1725 to actress Zanetta Farussi, wife of actor and dancer Gaetano Giuseppe Casanova. Giacomo was the first of six children, being followed by Francesco Giuseppe (1727–1803), Giovanni Battista (1730–1795), Faustina Maddalena (1731–1736), Maria Maddalena Antonia Stella (1732–1800), and Gaetano Alvise (1734–1783).

"At the time of Casanova's birth, the city of Venice thrived as the pleasure capital of Europe, ruled by political and religious conservatives who tolerated social vices and encouraged tourism. It was a required stop on the Grand Tour, traveled by young men coming of age, especially Englishmen. The famed Carnival, gambling houses, and beautiful courtesans were powerful drawing cards. This was the milieu that bred Casanova and made him its most famous and representative citizen.

"Casanova was cared for by his grandmother Marzia Baldissera while his mother toured about Europe in the theater. His father died when he was eight. As a child, Casanova suffered nosebleeds, and his grandmother sought help from a witch: 'Leaving the gondola, we enter a hovel, where we find an old woman sitting on a pallet, with a black cat in her arms and five or six others around her." Though the unguent applied was ineffective, Casanova was fascinated by the incantation. Perhaps to remedy the nosebleeds (a physician blamed the density of Venice's air), Casanova, on his ninth birthday, was sent to a boarding house on the mainland in Padua. For Casanova, the neglect by his parents was a bitter memory. 'So they got rid of me,' he proclaimed.

"Conditions at the boarding house were appalling so he appealed to be placed under the care of Abbé Gozzi, his primary instructor, who tutored him in academic subjects as well as the violin. Casanova moved in with the priest and his family and lived there through most of his teenage years. It was also in the Gozzi household that Casanova first came into contact with the opposite sex, when Gozzi's younger sister Bettina fondled him at the age of eleven. Bettina was 'pretty, lighthearted, and a great reader of romances. ... The girl pleased me at once, though I had no idea why. It was she who little by little kindled in my heart the first sparks of a feeling which later became my ruling passion." Although she subsequently married, Casanova maintained a lifelong attachment to Bettina and the Gozzi family.

"Early on, Casanova demonstrated a quick wit, an intense appetite for knowledge, and a perpetually inquisitive mind. He entered the University of Padua at twelve and graduated at seventeen, in 1742, with a degree in law ('for which I felt an unconquerable aversion'). It was his guardian's hope that he would become an ecclesiastical lawyer. Casanova had also studied moral philosophy, chemistry, and mathematics, and was keenly interested in medicine. ('I should have been allowed to do as I wished and become a physician, in which profession quackery is even more effective than it is in legal practice.' He frequently prescribed his own treatments for himself and friends. While attending the university, Casanova began to gamble and quickly got into debt, causing his recall to Venice by his grandmother, but the gambling habit became firmly established.

"Back in Venice, Casanova started his clerical law career and was admitted as an abbé after being conferred minor orders by the Patriarch of Venice. He shuttled back and forth to Padua to continue his university studies. By now, he had become something of a dandy—tall and dark, his long hair powdered, scented, and elaborately curled. He quickly ingratiated himself with a patron (something he was to do all his life), 76-year-old Venetian senator Alvise Gasparo Malipiero, the owner of Palazzo Malipiero, close to Casanova's home in Venice. Malipiero moved in the best circles and taught young Casanova a great deal about good food and wine, and how to behave in society. When Casanova was caught dallying with Malipiero's intended object of seduction, actress Teresa Imer, however, the senator drove both of them from his house. Casanova's growing curiosity about women led to his first complete sexual experience, with two sisters Nanetta and Maria Savorgnan, then fourteen and sixteen, who were distant relatives of the Grimanis. Casanova proclaimed that his life avocation was firmly established by this encounter.

"Scandals tainted Casanova's short church career. After his grandmother's death, Casanova entered a seminary for a short while, but soon his indebtedness landed him in prison for the first time. An attempt by his mother to secure him a position with bishop Bernardo de Bernardis was rejected by Casanova after a very brief trial of conditions in the bishop's Calabrian see. Instead, he found employment as a scribe with the powerful Cardinal Acquaviva in Rome. On meeting the pope, Casanova boldly asked for a dispensation to read the 'forbidden books' and from eating fish (which he claimed inflamed his eyes). He also composed love letters for another cardinal. But when Casanova became the scapegoat for a scandal involving a local pair of star-crossed lovers, Cardinal Acquaviva dismissed Casanova, thanking him for his sacrifice, but effectively ending his church career.

"In search of a new profession, Casanova bought a commission to become a military officer for the Republic of Venice. His first step was to look the part:

Reflecting that there was now little likelihood of my achieving fortune in my ecclesiastical career, I decided to dress as a soldier ... I inquire for a good tailor ... he brings me everything I need to impersonate a follower of Mars. ... My uniform was white, with a blue vest, a shoulder knot of silver and gold... I bought a long sword, and with my handsome cane in hand, a trim hat with a black cockade, with my hair cut in side whiskers and a long false pigtail, I set forth to impress the whole city.

"He joined a Venetian regiment at Corfu, his stay being broken by a brief trip to Constantinople, ostensibly to deliver a letter from his former master the Cardinal. He found his advancement too slow and his duty boring, and he managed to lose most of his pay playing faro. Casanova soon abandoned his military career and returned to Venice.

"At the age of 21, he set out to become a professional gambler, but losing all the money remaining from the sale of his commission, he turned to his old benefactor Alvise Grimani for a job. Casanova thus began his third career, as a violinist in the San Samuele theater, 'a menial journeyman of a sublime art in which, if he who excels is admired, the mediocrity is rightly despised. ... My profession was not a noble one, but I did not care. Calling everything prejudice, I soon acquired all the habits of my degraded fellow musicians.' He and some of his fellows, 'often spent our nights roaming through different quarters of the city, thinking up the most scandalous practical jokes and putting them into execution ... we amused ourselves by untying the gondolas moored before private homes, which then drifted with the current'. They also sent midwives and physicians on false calls.

"Good fortune came to the rescue when Casanova, unhappy with his lot as a musician, saved the life of a Venetian nobleman of the Bragadin family, who had a stroke while riding with Casanova in a gondola after a wedding ball. They immediately stopped to have the senator bled. Then, at the senator's palace, a physician bled the senator again and applied an ointment of mercury to the senator's chest (mercury was an all-purpose but toxic remedy of the time). The mercury raised his temperature and induced a massive fever, and Bragadin appeared to be choking on his own swollen windpipe. A priest was called as death seemed to be approaching. Casanova, however, took charge and taking responsibility for a change in treatment, under protest from the attending physician, ordered the removal of the ointment and the washing of the senator's chest with cool water. The senator recovered from his illness with rest and a sensible diet. Because of his youth and his facile recitation of medical knowledge, the senator and his two bachelor friends thought Casanova wise beyond his years, and concluded that he must be in possession of occult knowledge. As they were cabalists themselves, the senator invited Casanova into his household and he became a lifelong patron.

"Casanova stated in his memoirs:

I took the most creditable, the noblest, and the only natural course. I decided to put myself in a position where I need no longer go without the necessities of life: and what those necessities were for me no one could judge better than me.... No one in Venice could understand how an intimacy could exist between myself and three men of their character, they all heaven and I all earth; they most severe in their morals, and I addicted to every kind of dissolute living.

"For the next three years under the senator's patronage, working nominally as a legal assistant, Casanova led the life of a nobleman, dressing magnificently and, as was natural to him, spending most of his time gambling and engaging in amorous pursuits. His patron was exceedingly tolerant, but he warned Casanova that some day he would pay the price; 'I made a joke of his dire Prophecies and went my way.' However, not much later, Casanova was forced to leave Venice, due to further scandals. Casanova had dug up a freshly buried corpse in order to play a practical joke on an enemy and exact revenge—but the victim went into a paralysis, never to recover. And in another scandal, a young girl who had duped him accused him of rape and went to the officials. Casanova was later acquitted of this crime for lack of evidence, but by this time he had already fled from Venice.

"Escaping to Parma, Casanova entered into a three-month affair with a Frenchwoman he named 'Henriette', perhaps the deepest love he ever experienced—a woman who combined beauty, intelligence, and culture. In his words, 'They who believe that a woman is incapable of making a man equally happy all the twenty-four hours of the day have never known an Henriette. The joy which flooded my soul was far greater when I conversed with her during the day than when I held her in my arms at night. Having read a great deal and having natural taste, Henriette judged rightly of everything.' She also judged Casanova astutely. As noted Casanovist J. Rives Childs wrote:

Perhaps no woman so captivated Casanova as Henriette; few women obtained so deep an understanding of him. She penetrated his outward shell early in their relationship, resisting the temptation to unite her destiny with his. She came to discern his volatile nature, his lack of social background, and the precariousness of his finances. Before leaving, she slipped into his pocket five hundred louis, mark of her evaluation of him.

"Crestfallen and despondent, Casanova returned to Venice, and after a good gambling streak, he recovered and set off on a Grand Tour, reaching Paris in 1750. Along the way, from one town to another, he got into sexual escapades resembling operatic plots. In Lyon, he entered the society of Freemasonry, which appealed to his interest in secret rites and which, for the most part, attracted men of intellect and influence who proved useful in his life, providing valuable contacts and uncensored knowledge. Casanova was also attracted to Rosicrucianism.

"Casanova stayed in Paris for two years, learned the language, spent much time at the theater, and introduced himself to notables. Soon, however, his numerous liaisons were noted by the Paris police, as they were in nearly every city he visited.

"He moved on to Dresden in 1752 and encountered his mother. He wrote a well-received play, La Moluccheide, now lost. He then visited Prague and Vienna, where the tighter moral atmosphere of the latter city was not to his liking. He finally returned to Venice in 1753. In Venice, Casanova resumed his wicked escapades, picking up many enemies and gaining the greater attention of the Venetian inquisitors. His police record became a lengthening list of reported blasphemies, seductions, fights, and public controversy. A state spy, Giovanni Manucci, was employed to draw out Casanova's knowledge of cabalism and Freemasonry and to examine his library for forbidden books. Senator Bragadin, in total seriousness this time (being a former inquisitor himself), advised his 'son' to leave immediately or face the stiffest consequences.

"The following day, at age thirty, Casanova was arrested: 'The Tribunal, having taken cognizance of the grave faults committed by G. Casanova primarily in public outrages against the holy religion, their Excellencies have caused him to be arrested and imprisoned under the Leads.' 'The Leads' was a prison of seven cells on the top floor of the east wing of the Doge's palace, reserved for prisoners of higher status and political crimes and named for the lead plates covering the palace roof. Without a trial, Casanova was sentenced to five years in the 'unescapable' prison.

"He was placed in solitary confinement with clothing, a pallet bed, table and armchair in 'the worst of all the cells', where he suffered greatly from the darkness, summer heat and 'millions of fleas.' He was soon housed with a series of cell mates, and after five months and a personal appeal from Count Bragadin was given warm winter bedding and a monthly stipend for books and better food. During exercise walks he was granted in the prison garret, he found a piece of black marble and an iron bar which he smuggled back to his cell; he hid the bar inside his armchair. When he was temporarily without cell mates, he spent two weeks sharpening the bar into a spike on the stone. Then he began to gouge through the wooden floor underneath his bed, knowing that his cell was directly above the Inquisitor's chamber. Just three days before his intended escape, during a festival when no officials would be in the chamber below, Casanova was moved to a larger, lighter cell with a view, despite his protests that he was perfectly happy where he was. In his new cell, 'I sat in my armchair like a man in a stupor; motionless as a statue, I saw that I had wasted all the efforts I had made, and I could not repent of them. I felt that I had nothing to hope for, and the only relief left to me was not to think of the future.'

"Overcoming his inertia, Casanova set upon another escape plan. He solicited the help of the prisoner in the adjacent cell, Father Balbi, a renegade priest. The spike, carried to the new cell inside the armchair, was passed to the priest in a folio Bible carried under a heaping plate of pasta by the hoodwinked jailer. The priest made a hole in his ceiling, climbed across and made a hole in the ceiling of Casanova's cell. To neutralize his new cell mate, who was a spy, Casanova played on his superstitions and terrorized him into silence. When Balbi broke through to Casanova's cell, Casanova lifted himself through the ceiling, leaving behind a note that quoted the 117th Psalm (Vulgate): 'I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord'.

"The spy remained behind, too frightened of the consequences if he were caught escaping with the others. Casanova and Balbi pried their way through the lead plates and onto the sloping roof of the Doge's Palace, with a heavy fog swirling. The drop to the nearby canal being too great, Casanova pried open the grate over a dormer window, and broke the window to gain entry. They found a long ladder on the roof, and with the additional use of a bedsheet 'rope' that Casanova had prepared, lowered themselves into the room whose floor was twenty-five feet below. They rested until morning, changed clothes, then broke a small lock on an exit door and passed into a palace corridor, through galleries and chambers, and down stairs, where by convincing the guard they had inadvertently been locked into the palace after an official function, they left through a final door. It was six in the morning and they escaped by gondola. Eventually, Casanova reached Paris, where he arrived on the same day (January 5, 1757) that Robert-François Damiens made an attempt on the life of Louis XV. (Casanova would later witness and describe his execution.)

"Skeptics contend that Casanova's tale of escape is implausible, and that he simply bribed his way to freedom with the help of his patron. However, some physical evidence does exist in the state records, including repairs to the cell ceilings. Thirty years later in 1787, Casanova wrote Story of My Flight, which was very popular and was reprinted in many languages, and he repeated the tale a little later in his memoirs. Casanova's judgment of the exploit is characteristic:

Thus did God provide me with what I needed for an escape which was to be a wonder if not a miracle. I admit that I am proud of it; but my pride does not come from my having succeeded, for luck had a good deal to do with that; it comes from my having concluded that the thing could be done and having had the courage to undertake it.

"He knew his stay in Paris might be a long one and he proceeded accordingly: 'I saw that to accomplish anything I must bring all my physical and moral faculties in play, make the acquaintance of the great and the powerful, exercise strict self-control, and play the chameleon.' Casanova had matured, and this time in Paris, though still depending at times on quick thinking and decisive action, he was more calculating and deliberate. His first task was to find a new patron. He reconnected with old friend de Bernis, now the Foreign Minister of France. Casanova was advised by his patron to find a means of raising funds for the state as a way to gain instant favor. Casanova promptly became one of the trustees of the first state lottery, and one of its best ticket salesmen. The enterprise earned him a large fortune quickly. With money in hand, he traveled in high circles and undertook new seductions. He duped many socialites with his occultism, particularly the Marquise Jeanne d'Urfé, using his excellent memory which made him appear to have a sorcerer's power of numerology. In Casanova's view, 'deceiving a fool is an exploit worthy of an intelligent man'.

"Casanova claimed to be a Rosicrucian and an alchemist, aptitudes which made him popular with some of the most prominent figures of the era, among them Madame de Pompadour, Count de Saint-Germain, d'Alembert, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. So popular was alchemy among the nobles, particularly the search for the 'philosopher's stone', that Casanova was highly sought after for his supposed knowledge, and he profited handsomely. He met his match, however, in the Count de Saint-Germain: 'This very singular man, born to be the most barefaced of all imposters, declared with impunity, with a casual air, that he was three hundred years old, that he possessed the universal medicine, that he made anything he liked from nature, that he created diamonds.'

"De Bernis decided to send Casanova to Dunkirk on his first spying mission. Casanova was paid well for his quick work and this experience prompted one of his few remarks against the ancien régime and the class he was dependent on. He remarked in hindsight, 'All the French ministers are the same. They lavished money which came out of the other people's pockets to enrich their creatures, and they were absolute: The down-trodden people counted for nothing, and, through this, the indebtedness of the State and the confusion of finances were the inevitable results. A Revolution was necessary."

"As the Seven Years' War began, Casanova was again called to help increase the state treasury. He was entrusted with a mission of selling state bonds in Amsterdam, Holland being the financial center of Europe at the time. He succeeded in selling the bonds at only an 8% discount, and the following year was rich enough to found a silk manufactory with his earnings. The French government even offered him a title and a pension if he would become a French citizen and work on behalf of the Finance Ministry, but he declined, perhaps because it would frustrate his Wanderlust. Casanova had reached his peak of fortune but could not sustain it. He ran the business poorly, borrowed heavily trying to save it, and spent much of his wealth on constant liaisons with his female workers who were his 'harem'.

"For his debts, Casanova was imprisoned again, this time at For-l'Évêque, but was liberated four days afterwards, upon the insistence of the Marquise d'Urfé. Unfortunately, though he was released, his patron de Bernis was dismissed by Louis XV at that time and Casanova's enemies closed in on him. He sold the rest of his belongings and secured another mission to Holland to distance himself from his troubles.

"This time, however, his mission failed and he fled to Cologne, then Stuttgart in the spring of 1760, where he lost the rest of his fortune. He was yet again arrested for his debts, but managed to escape to Switzerland. Weary of his wanton life, Casanova visited the monastery of Einsiedeln and considered the simple, scholarly life of a monk. He returned to his hotel to think on the decision only to encounter a new object of desire, and reverting to his old instincts, all thoughts of a monk's life were quickly forgotten. Moving on, he visited Albrecht von Haller and Voltaire, and arrived in Marseille, then Genoa, Florence, Rome, Naples, Modena, and Turin, moving from one sexual romp to another.

"In 1760, Casanova started styling himself the Chevalier de Seingalt, a name he would increasingly use for the rest of his life. On occasion, he would also call himself Count de Farussi (using his mother's maiden name) and when Pope Clement XIII presented Casanova with the Papal Order of the Éperon d'or, he had an impressive cross and ribbon to display on his chest.

"Back in Paris, he set about one of his most outrageous schemes—convincing his old dupe the Marquise d'Urfé that he could turn her into a young man through occult means. The plan did not yield Casanova the big payoff he had hoped for, and the Marquise d'Urfé finally lost faith in him.

"Casanova traveled to England in 1763, hoping to sell his idea of a state lottery to English officials. He wrote of the English, 'the people have a special character, common to the whole nation, which makes them think they are superior to everyone else. It is a belief shared by all nations, each thinking itself the best. And they are all right.' Through his connections, he worked his way up to an audience with King George III, using most of the valuables he had stolen from the Marquise d'Urfé. While working the political angles, he also spent much time in the bedroom, as was his habit. As a means to find females for his pleasure, not being able to speak English, he put an advertisement in the newspaper to let an apartment to the 'right' person. He interviewed many young women, choosing one 'Mistress Pauline' who suited him well. Soon, he established himself in her apartment and seduced her. These and other liaisons, however, left him weak with venereal disease and he left England broke and ill.

"He went on to Belgium, recovered, and then for the next three years, traveled all over Europe, covering about 4,500 miles by coach over rough roads, and going as far as Moscow and St Petersburg (the average daily coach trip being about 30 miles in a day). Again, his principal goal was to sell his lottery scheme to other governments and repeat the great success he had with the French government. But a meeting with Frederick the Great bore no fruit and in the surrounding German lands, the same result. Not lacking either connections or confidence, Casanova went to Russia and met with Catherine the Great but she flatly turned down the lottery idea.

"In 1766, he was expelled from Warsaw following a pistol duel with Colonel Franciszek Ksawery Branicki over an Italian actress, a lady friend of theirs. Both duelists were wounded, Casanova on the left hand. The hand recovered on its own, after Casanova refused the recommendation of doctors that it be amputated. Other stops failed to gain any takers for the lottery. He returned to Paris for several months in 1767 and hit the gambling salons, only to be expelled from France by order of Louis XV himself, primarily for Casanova's scam involving the Marquise d'Urfé. Now known across Europe for his reckless behavior, Casanova would have difficulty overcoming his notoriety and gaining any fortune. So he headed for Spain, where he was not as well known. He tried his usual approach, leaning on well-placed contacts (often Freemasons), wining and dining with nobles of influence, and finally arranging an audience with the local monarch, in this case Charles III. When no doors opened for him, however, he could only roam across Spain, with little to show for it. In Barcelona, he escaped assassination and landed in jail for six weeks. His Spanish adventure a failure, he returned to France briefly, then to Italy.

"In Rome, Casanova had to prepare a way for his return to Venice. While waiting for supporters to gain him legal entry into Venice, Casanova began his modern Tuscan-Italian translation of the Iliad, his History of the Troubles in Poland, and a comic play. To ingratiate himself with the Venetian authorities, Casanova did some commercial spying for them. After months without a recall, however, he wrote a letter of appeal directly to the Inquisitors. At last, he received his long sought permission and burst into tears upon reading 'We, Inquisitors of State, for reasons known to us, give Giacomo Casanova a free safe-conduct ... empowering him to come, go, stop, and return, hold communication wheresoever he pleases without let or hindrance. So is our will.' Casanova was permitted to return to Venice in September 1774 after eighteen years of exile.

"At first, his return to Venice was a cordial one and he was a celebrity. Even the Inquisitors wanted to hear how he had escaped from their prison. Of his three bachelor patrons, however, only Dandolo was still alive and Casanova was invited back to live with him. He received a small stipend from Dandolo and hoped to live from his writings, but that was not enough. He reluctantly became a spy again for Venice, paid by piece work, reporting on religion, morals, and commerce, most of it based on gossip and rumor he picked up from social contacts. He was disappointed. No financial opportunities of interest came about and few doors opened for him in society as in the past.

"At age 49, the years of reckless living and the thousands of miles of travel had taken their toll. Casanova's smallpox scars, sunken cheeks, and hook nose became all the more noticeable. His easygoing manner was now more guarded. Prince Charles de Ligne, a friend (and uncle of his future employer), described him around 1784:

He would be a good-looking man if he were not ugly; he is tall and built like Hercules, but of an African tint; eyes full of life and fire, but touchy, wary, rancorous—and this gives him a ferocious air. It is easier to put him in a rage than to make him gay. He laughs little, but makes other laugh. ... He has a manner of saying things which reminds me of Harlequin or Figaro, and which makes them sound witty.

"Venice had changed for him. Casanova now had little money for gambling, few willing females worth pursuing, and few acquaintances to enliven his dull days. He heard of the death of his mother and, more paining, visited the deathbed of Bettina Gozzi, who had first introduced him to sex and who died in his arms. His Iliad was published in three volumes, but to limited subscribers and yielding little money. He got into a published dispute with Voltaire over religion. When he asked, 'Suppose that you succeed in destroying superstition. With what will you replace it?' Voltaire shot back, 'I like that. When I deliver humanity from a ferocious beast which devours it, can I be asked what I shall put in its place.' From Casanova's point of view, if Voltaire had 'been a proper philosopher, he would have kept silent on that subject ... the people need to live in ignorance for the general peace of the nation'.

"In 1779, Casanova found Francesca, an uneducated seamstress, who became his live-in lover and housekeeper, and who loved him devotedly. Later that year, the Inquisitors put him on the payroll and sent him to investigate commerce between the Papal states and Venice. Other publishing and theater ventures failed, primarily from lack of capital. In a downward spiral, Casanova was expelled again from Venice in 1783, after writing a vicious satire poking fun at Venetian nobility. In it he made his only public statement that Grimani was his true father.

"Forced to resume his travels again, Casanova arrived in Paris, and in November 1783 met Benjamin Franklin while attending a presentation on aeronautics and the future of balloon transport. For a while, Casanova served as secretary and pamphleteer to Sebastian Foscarini, Venetian ambassador in Vienna. He also became acquainted with Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's librettist, who noted about Casanova, 'This singular man never liked to be in the wrong.' Notes by Casanova indicate that he may have made suggestions to Da Ponte concerning the libretto for Mozart's Don Giovanni.

"In 1785, after Foscarini died, Casanova began searching for another position. A few months later, he became the librarian to Count Joseph Karl von Waldstein, a chamberlain of the emperor, in the Castle of Dux, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). The Count—himself a Freemason, cabalist, and frequent traveler—had taken to Casanova when they had met a year earlier at Foscarini's residence. Although the job offered security and good pay, Casanova describes his last years as boring and frustrating, even though it was the most productive time for writing. His health had deteriorated dramatically and he found life among peasants to be less than stimulating. He was only able to make occasional visits to Vienna and Dresden for relief. Although Casanova got on well with the Count, his employer was a much younger man with his own eccentricities. The Count often ignored him at meals and failed to introduce him to important visiting guests. Moreover, Casanova, the testy outsider, was thoroughly disliked by most of the other inhabitants of the Castle of Dux. Casanova's only friends seemed to be his fox terriers. In despair, Casanova considered suicide, but instead decided that he must live on to record his memoirs, which he did until his death.

"He certainly visited Prague, the capital city and principal cultural center of Bohemia, on many occasions. In October 1787, he met Lorenzo da Ponte, the librettist of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, in Prague at the time of the opera's first production and likely met the composer as well at the same time. There is reason to be believe that he was also in Prague in 1791 for the coronation of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II as king of Bohemia, an event that included the first production of Mozart's opera La clemenza di Tito. Casanova is known to have drafted dialogue suitable for a Don Juan drama at the time of his visit to Prague in 1787, but none of his verses was ever incorporated into Mozart's opera. His reaction to seeing licentious behavior similar to his own held up to moral scrutiny as it is in Mozart's opera is not recorded.

"In 1797, word arrived that the Republic of Venice had ceased to exist and that Napoleon Bonaparte had seized Casanova's home city. It was too late to return home. Casanova died on June 4, 1798, at age 73. His last words are said to have been 'I have lived as a philosopher and I die as a Christian'. Casanova was buried at Dux (Duchcov), but the exact place of his grave was forgotten over the years and remains unknown today."

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments" -Shakespeare

Friday, September 26, 2014

If these back-up guys really exist, they are complete and utter morons, if they truly believe they can trust these women. Or perhaps these women are just deluding themselves. Or perhaps just fantasizing to the the extent it becomes hallucinations

When I was a kid there was a TV program called The Invaders. The star, Roy Thinnes, said at its peak he got thousands of letters a week from women. I don't doubt some of the women thought they had a relationship with him. Maybe they thought he was sending them messages through the TV.

Married women are more likely have a Plan B in the background
Back-up is likely to be an old friend who has always had feelings for them
Other candidates include ex-boyfriend/husband, colleague or gym buddy

"Half of all women have a fall-back partner on call should their current relationship turn sour, it emerged today.

"A substantial percentage have kept another man in mind in case they end up single.

"And married women are more likely have a Plan B in the background than those who are just in a relationship.

"The back-up is likely to be an old friend who has always had feelings for them
+2

"The back-up is likely to be an old friend who has always had feelings for them.
TODAY'S POLL

"It also emerged the back-up is likely to be an old friend who has always had feelings for the woman in question.

"But other candidates are an ex-boyfriend or ex-husband, a colleague - or someone who they have met at the gym.

"The survey of 1,000 women also found Plan B is also likely to be someone whom she has known for around seven years, who will be 'ready and waiting' because of 'unfinished business'.

"Furthermore, around one in ten women said their Plan B had already confessed his undying love, while one in five said they were confident he would 'drop everything' for her, if she asked him to.

"Slightly more than four in ten said they had got to know the man whilst they were with their partner, while a similar percentage said he was 'on the scene' long before.

One in five said they were confident he would 'drop everything' for her, if she asked him to

"Around one in four women who have a back-up plan have feelings as strong for him as they do for their other half.

"Incredibly, 12 per cent went as far as to admit their feelings were 'stronger' for Plan B, and close to seven in ten admitted they are currently in contact with him.

"But despite the secrecy involved in having a close friend or ex to turn to, around half of the women who took part in the poll said their other half was aware of the 'third party'.

"Of those, one in five said they were able to joke about it, but one in three said their man was 'uncomfortable' discussing him.

"One in four admitted their current partner had met their Plan B, while one in five admitted he was a friend of the man in her life.

"The good news for the nation's men is that one in three women said they 'doubted' anything would ever happen with the man in the background.

"Around half had a 'never say never' approach, while trouble may lie ahead for one in six who said they were 'seriously considering' rekindling their romance with the man in the shadows.

"A spokesman for online market research company OnePoll.com said: 'For our research to establish that 50 per cent of women in relationships have a 'Plan B' is a worrying sign.

"'This news may cause a few men in relationships to think twice about not taking the rubbish out or choosing a night down the pub in favour of a cosy night in with his partner.

"'This could spark fear in men across the UK and be great news for women looking for that extra bit of love and care so that their attentions aren't swayed.

"'The saying that "the grass isn't always greener" clearly isn't deterring women of today. They understand that anything can happen and are ensuring they have a solid back up plan should things go sour with their current man'

"'With sites like Facebook and Twitter, it's easier than ever to stay in touch with an old flame. Men need to be aware of any 'old friends' that turn up out of the blue that's for sure.'"

When I was 21 years old I asked my mother, who was the night admitting clerk at the local ER, how many of the "rape victims" who came in were lying. She told me 90%, which shocked me then and which even now I have a hard time believing.

I've also known women who clearly described some version of rape and continued to see him.

"Rape is a vicious crime, one that disproportionately affects poor women and incarcerated men, but Barack Obama knows his voters, and so his recent remarks on the subject were focused not on penitentiaries, broken families, or Indian reservations but on college campuses, where the despicable crime is bound up in a broader feminist Kulturkampf only tangentially related to the very real problem of sexual violence against women.

"The subject is a maddening one. President Obama repeated the endlessly reiterated but thoroughly debunked claim that one in five women will be sexually assaulted in her college years. The actual rate is . . . sort of an interesting problem, the information being so inconsistent and contradictory that one almost suspects that it is so by design.

"President Obama, who gives every indication of being committed to the bitter end to his belief in the omnipotence of his merest utterance, gave a speech in which he affirmed his position that rape is wicked and that we should discourage it. Instead of giving a content-free speech, he should have directed his Department of Justice to put together some definitive data on the question.

"Much of the scholarly literature estimates that the actual rate is more like a tenth of that one-in-five rate, 2.16 percent, or 21.6 per 1,000 to use the conventional formulation. But that number is problematic, too, as are most of the numbers related to sexual assault, as the National Institute of Justice, the DoJ’s research arm, documents. For example, two surveys conducted practically in tandem produced victimization rates of 0.16 percent and 1.7 percent, respectively – i.e., the latter estimate was eleven times the former. The NIJ blames defective wording on survey questions.

"This is a matter of concern because a comparison between the NIJ’s estimates of college-campus rape and the estimates of rape in the general population compiled by the DoJ’s National Crime Victimization Survey implies that the rate of rape among college students is more than ten times that of the general population.

"It is not impossible that this is the case, but there is significant cause for skepticism. For example, in the general population college-age women have significantly lower rates of sexual assault than do girls twelve to seventeen, while a fifth of all rape victims are younger than twelve. Most of the familiar demographic trends in violent crime are reflected in the rape statistics: Poor women are sexually assaulted at twice the rate of women in households earning $50,000 a year or more; African American women are victimized at higher rates than are white women, while Native American women are assaulted at twice the rate of white women; divorced and never-married women are assaulted at seven times the rate of married women; women in urban communities are assaulted at higher rates than those in the suburbs, and those in rural areas are assaulted at dramatically higher rates. But there is at least one significant departure from the usual trends in violent crime: Only about 9 percent of those raped are men.

"It is probably the case that the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses is wildly exaggerated—not necessarily in absolute terms, but relative to the rate of sexual assault among college-aged women with similar demographic characteristics who are not attending institutions of higher learning. The DoJ hints at this in its criticism of survey questions, some of which define 'sexual assault' so loosely as to include actions that 'are not criminal.' This might explain why so many women who answer survey questions in a way consistent with their being counted victims of sexual assault frequently display such a blasé attitude toward the events in question and so rarely report them. As the DoJ study puts it: “The most commonly reported response — offered by more than half the students — was that they did not think the incident was serious enough to report. More than 35 percent said they did not report the incident because they were unclear as to whether a crime was committed or that harm was intended.”

"If you are having a little trouble getting your head around a definition of 'sexual assault' so liberal that it includes everything from forcible rape at gunpoint to acts that not only fail to constitute crimes under the law but leave the victims 'unclear as to whether harm was intended,' then you are, unlike much of our culture, still sane.

"Of all the statistics and evidence that are prevalent in the discussion of sexual assault, there is one datum conspicuous in its absence: the fact that sexual assault has been cut by nearly two-thirds since 1995. Under the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ apples-to-apples year-over-year comparison, sexual assault has declined 64 percent since the Clinton years. That is excellent news, indeed, but it does not feed the rape-epidemic narrative, and so it must be set aside."